Fiction & Whimsy

There was a remarkable lack of public debate in San Francisco — or anywhere else — on Adult Diaper Dispensation (ADD). All costs were loudly underwritten by The Dignity Foundation, a charitable body dedicated to community development, medical research, K-12 education, and, now, small businesses hit by the “squat-by defecation” of serial defecants.

Would you like a TDF annual report? We have one for you right here. It makes no mention of our corporate sibling and sponsor, a disposable paper-goods manufacturer that is aging out of infant goods into a more mature market. Our Dignity Initiative public information campaign takes a broad-based social education approach to bring the public up to speed on what we can do — together — through top-level messaging in high-traffic spaces with framing that deploys innocuous word-play rather that blunt fear.

This top-level messaging was visible to all who cared to look out the car window at the blinking billboard near the off-ramp at Duboce. Dignity Is No Accident(s).

Like this:

“I’m not really looking to change, Mom.”

“Your life could be easier if you didn’t have muscular dystrophy. What I would have given for this Genetic Reparative Therapy when you were little.”

Gretchen poured water in the coffee maker. “Yeah, I’m well aware that there’s a list out there of Lives That Suck and — of course! — my name is on it.”

Alice continued. “I can’t believe you would even consider not being part of this study.”

“Well, jeez, Mom, I have to consider not doing it.” Gretchen leaned against the counter. The machine hissed and steamed. “Remember when they wanted to fix my foot and didn’t mention they’d be removing half of it? Good thing we pressed for details on that one.”

Silence.

“I have to live with the results of this experiment – I will be the result of this experiment. And I gotta tell you – just because something can be done is not necessarily a good enough reason to do it.”

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And she had made sure the door was locked. She stood there, watching the gray-blue paint and listening to what was happening from within. At first, nothing. Then a murmuring confusion, then a rapid rise in decibel levels, quickly becoming Frank’s singular baritone summoning Gretchen. It didn’t occur to anyone that it was anything but an accident.

She waited and then knocked to get their attention.

“Hi!” she called. She had to knock harder because, as usual, they were still talking. “Hi, everybody! Are you ready to start the meeting?”

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Alice’s schoolteacher handwriting greeted Gretchen when she flipped through the mail that evening. It was a floridly pious Mother’s Day card with a letter enclosed. Her mother must have sent it right after Gretchen had called about the board meeting fiasco. Oh Alice, Gretchen snorted pleasurably. I couldn’t have picked a better card myself.

Underneath the card’s summary appreciation for maternal sacrifices, physical and emotional, Alice had written, “Thought you might like to see the enclosed item right now. I think it confirms that we are related. I cannot take credit for why you are who you are but I did have a hand in it. Then again, you were always a rotten child. Not that I had anything to do with that. Love, Mom.

The letter was her mother’s same handwriting. Cheered, Gretchen set to reading it. It was dated from May 1970 and addressed to a Desmond Wallace, Chair of Fundraising Operations for the National Cerebral Palsy Association. Oh dear.

“She never wanted to live like that.“

“I’ll never forget what one of her doctors from one of those really horrible countries said to my sister, ‘It’s like you want what the women in my country already have, this ‘medical care’ that isn’t really medical care at all. How very strange.’ It IS really strange. We just want to not have what a lot of women in way poorer nations already don’t have and here we have to fight to not have it! …Fortunately, Choices & Compassion has been there for me and together we got my representative, Joe King, to sponsor a bill here in California that gives pregnant women the right to prescriptions that will hasten their births. To use when WE know it’s time. Just the knowledge that I’ve got the drugs should I want them gives me incredible peace of mind. And just the knowledge that he has no liability, no matter the outcome of my using his prescription to hasten my birth which no medical provider was required to attend, gives my doctor even more peace of mind.”

As of today, April 1, 2017, Tales From the Crip is proud to announce its full opposition to opposition to so-called “physician-assisted birth” that gives a woman who is suffering from pregnancy the right to birth naturally and when she is ready.

We believe that physicians should be legally permitted to prescribe medication that will be self-administered to induce labor when a woman has been diagnosed as being within 6 months of birthing.

We feel SUPER about a law that does not state that a prescribing doctor — or any medical personnel — attend a woman who has self-administered their prescribed drug to hasten birth.

We feel super-DUPER about a law that shields prescribing physicians from…complicated outcomes of such births by lowering the acceptable practice standard to the “good faith” level. For just this one area of care.

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There was no way Alice had fit all that into one suitcase. Gretchen accepted the coffee but waved off questions about her sore throat. She rocked thoughtfully as Alice fretted about her being too ill for the clinic visit later in the day. “Mom? You’re looming.”

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for Belma González

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When Gretchen landed in the hospital again with pneumonia in 1993 she learned she had something called sleep apnea, plus chronic respiratory failure and minor heart damage that she, only 27, could expect to heal with proper treatment. At the first Wednesday morning meeting following her return to work a few weeks later, the West-Hesperidan women’s free clinic staff apologized to her. Even with her cane, Gretchen couldn’t stand long enough for fourteen women to express remorse so everyone stayed seated instead of making a circle around her. The gist was that while they knew Gretchen had muscular dystrophy, they still hadn’t thought of her “like that.” They said they were sorry for not respecting that Gretchen had a disability and for assuming that she had been lazy and napping at her desk when she was, in fact, semi-conscious and unconscious, depending on the time of day.